


Sloane, Slayer

by regenderate



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 22:20:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15398760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: Sloane had never been strong. She hadn’t worked at it, really; she hadn’t much cared to. So when a flick of her wrist sent her hat soaring up (and then crashing back down), and then when she caught it easily, she was immediately shaken.





	Sloane, Slayer

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the Called from Afar fan project. https://calledfromafar.tumblr.com

It happened in the middle of Sloane’s high school graduation.

One moment, she was walking across the stage, grinning as she accepted her diploma; the next, she was shaking her principal’s hand and jumped back in shock at the pained look on her principal’s face. She whispered an apology and moved on, mortified, feeling her embarrassment mingle with something unfamiliar in her veins, and when she threw her hat, it flew high above all the others, hitting the ceiling of the auditorium. 

Sloane had never been strong. She hadn’t worked at it, really; she hadn’t much cared to. So when a flick of her wrist sent her hat soaring up (and then crashing back down), and then when she caught it easily, she was immediately shaken. She glanced around, trying to figure out whether anyone had seen, but they were all too busy cheering and hugging each other. They had just graduated, after all.

Instead of hugging, Sloane pinched her upper arm as hard as she could. It hurt more than it should have. And that meant she wasn’t dreaming. She looked at her arm and saw that it was already starting to bruise. Moving as slowly as possible, with as little force as possible, she put her hat back on her head, and then, as the orchestra started up, she very slowly stood, paying attention to the way the chair creaked when she pushed down on it. Something had happened, and she didn’t know what it was.

Sloane’s parents and grandparents came up to her outside the auditorium and hugged her, but she didn’t dare hug back. She didn’t want to hurt them. They were all talking about where they were going for dinner, and all Sloane wanted was to go sit alone in her room until she had figured out how to control-- whatever this was. 

But she didn’t want anyone to know that anything was wrong, because no one would believe her. And this was probably normal anyway. Which meant that she had no choice but to go with her family to dinner so that they wouldn’t think anything was wrong.

Which meant that she had to drive to dinner. 

Her sister, Amelia, wanted to ride with her, and Sloane was in no position to say no-- this was a moment to share with her family, after all, or it would have been if Sloane wasn’t seriously freaked out. So she pulled the car door open with half as much effort as she would usually have used, and buckled her seatbelt, and oh-so-carefully pulled the door closed. She managed to not break anything starting the car and putting it in drive, and then all she had to do was be careful with the gas pedal, which she always was anyway.

It was a ten-minute drive to the restaurant. Sloane took deep breaths. She could do this. Her hat bumped against the back of the seat, and she took it off, tossing it into the backseat. It made a  _ thwack _ noise against the leather. 

“Are you okay?” Amelia asked.

“I’m fine,” Sloane said. “It’s kind of a weird day.”

“Yeah,” Amelia said. “It’s weird that you’re going to college.”

“Exactly.” Sloane let herself press a little harder on the gas pedal; she was going way under the speed limit. 

She cruised along like that for another minute or so, and then she realized that the light in front of her was red. She jammed her foot on the break, and the car slowed down, but then she felt something break, and the car didn’t stop, and it rolled out into the intersection, and Sloane saw a car coming towards them, and in that split second, some instinct she hadn’t even known she had kicked in. She twisted in her seat and seized the handle of the car door, pushing the door open and ripping it off its hinges, while Amelia cowered in the seat next to her. Sloane shrank back in her seat, lying on her back, feet pressing against the door, which she was somehow managing to hold on to with both hands. As the other car hit, Sloane used all of the strength in her legs to push against it, and, to her surprise, it worked: the other car was stopped, and Sloane’s car tilted a little before she released the door. It fell to the ground between the two cars, and Sloane let her legs fall, her head resting against the gear shift. All this happened over the course of about two seconds.

“Sloane, did you do that?” Amelia asked.

“I think so,” Sloane said, breathing hard. 

“How?” Amelia asked.

“I don’t know,” Sloane said. Her voice was high-pitched. She thought to herself, as if far away, that she might be panicking. She twisted herself back into a regular sitting position. “The brake broke.”

“Broke brake,” Amelia giggled. 

“Hey, this is serious,” Sloane said. “We could have died.”

“Yeah,” Amelia said, still through giggles. “But I’d rather think about broke brake. Broke brake!”

Sloane heard sirens in the background. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw ambulance lights flashing. 

“Are you hurt?” she asked Amelia.

“I don’t think so,” Amelia said. She was still giggling.

“Okay,” Sloane said. She thought for a moment. The ambulance was going to come, and so were the police, and they would all be confused about what had happened. That was okay. Sloane was confused, too; she’d just pretend to be clueless. Which she mostly was. “I’m going to call Mom.”

“What? The ambulance is coming,” Amelia said.

“I know,” Sloane said. “But I don’t want her to be worried.”

“Okay,” Amelia said.

Sloane took out her phone and flipped it open. She speed-dialed her mom and put the phone to her ear. Her mom picked up immediately.

“Hi, where are you?” she asked.

“Um,” Sloane said, “Amelia and I kind of got into an accident. We’re both fine, but the car’s kind of not.”

There was a tapping to Sloane’s left. She looked over and saw a paramedic knocking on the passenger window. Her mother was still talking in her ear, frantically asking questions.

“We’re at Woodward and Maple,” Sloane said, “and I have to go, the ambulance is here. But we’re not hurt! I love you!”

She snapped the phone closed as Amelia rolled the window down and the paramedic leaned in and started asking questions. Sloane watched as Amelia assured the medic that she was fine, and then Sloane said that she was fine, too.

“And I think our mom is on her way here,” she added.

The medics looked confused, and Sloane realized that the damage that had been done to the car looked much worse than any damage that had been done to Sloane or Amelia.

Something to thank her brand new super strength for.

“I think I can climb out this way,” she said, undoing her seatbelt and looking at the gaping hole where the door had been.

“It’s probably better if you don’t do that,” the paramedic said. “We don’t want to move you yet. Do you hurt anywhere?”

“No,” Sloane said. “Should I? The car was moving pretty slowly when it got hit. I hit the brake too hard and it snapped.”

“The brake snapped?” the paramedic asked.

“Brake broke,” Amelia said again.

“Brake broke,” Sloane agreed.

She saw her mom’s car pulling into a parking lot off Maple. 

“That’s my mom,” she said to the paramedic. “She’s here. Can we go?”

“You really should have a doctor check you out,” the medic said, as Sloane watched her mother get out of her own car.

“I didn’t get hurt at all,” Sloane said. 

“Me, either,” Amelia said. “We can go, right?”

“Are you both under eighteen?” the paramedic asked.

“I’m eighteen,” Sloane said, but just then her frazzled mother came striding towards the wreck, and everything got all mixed up in trying to get out. Sloane managed to grab her hat out of the backseat of the car, and then she and Amelia both got out through the passenger side door.

They had to stay at the site of the accident for a while, and then a tow truck came to take the car away, and then, finally, they went home. Dinner was forgotten, and Sloane managed to convince everyone to let her rest.

She didn’t rest.

Instead, she crept into the computer room and shut the door behind her, flipping the computer on. It took some time to start up, during which she sat on her hands and quietly tried not to freak out. Once it was on, she opened a search engine and paused. What should she type?

_ sudden onset super strength _ . Enter.

She scrolled through forums and blog posts. She didn’t find much at first, but then she struck upon a post on a forum for teenage girls. It had been made earlier that day.

_ I think something is wrong _ , the post said.  _ I was washing dishes just now and all of a sudden I put a dish down and accidentally broke it. My arms and legs feel strange, like my blood is electric. I think I have super strength. I have to be careful typing so that I don’t break my keyboard. I’m really worried that something’s horribly wrong with me. Has anyone else experienced this? _

Sloane scrolled down and read more. There were girls replying who thought the original poster was crazy, but mixed in that were girls who had had the exact same experience. All of them had gotten powers at around three in the afternoon in Eastern Time, all that day. Some of them had been attacked by people with strange faces, and Sloane made a mental note to find something sharp to carry with her. 

No one on the forum, however, had any idea  _ why _ this was happening. Sloane signed up for the website and added her own reply--  _ it was in the middle of my high school graduation!  _ she typed indignantly-- and then she wrote down the name of the forum and the thread before closing out of the page and clearing the browser history. 

The days following were boring, mostly. Sloane went to people’s graduation parties, relying on her mother for rides, and then she was packing to go to college. At night, she had more vivid dreams than usual, but she assumed they were just products of her own anxiety; between college and super strength, she had a lot to get on with. She got more and more used to her strength, and less and less afraid of breaking things. She kept checking back on the forum, and eventually she sort of made friends with some of the other girls, but no one had a clear answer as to what had happened, and no one lived close enough to her to meet in person. It wasn’t until she went to college, driving all the way across Canada to get to Vermont, that she met another.

This one was named Nora, and she and Sloane were on the same orientation trip. It was in the middle of the woods that Sloane thought she was completely alone and decided to see what the biggest branch she could break with her bare hands was: Nora saw her and immediately made it into a competition. Later, they sat a little apart from the campfire, talking in low voices about their powers.

“Yeah, it just kind of showed up,” Nora said. “I’m not from a super nice town, so I’m actually pretty glad to have some superpowers on my side.”

“I’ve heard some people have been attacked by vampires,” Sloane said, because the girls on the Internet had realized that the people with the funny faces also had fangs and an aversion to Christian symbols. “I carry a stake with me, just in case, but I haven’t been attacked yet.” She paused. “I don’t go outside much at night. This feels dangerous to me.”

“Less dangerous because we’re here, I bet,” Nora said. “Vampires, huh? That would explain a lot.”

When Sloane got back from the trip, the first thing she did was go to the school library and log on to the forum. The girls on the forum were all abuzz-- there was a new TV commercial out, apparently. One of them linked to a fuzzy video, clearly filmed on a TV screen.

“Are you suddenly super strong?” one of the actors, a guy about Sloane’s age with a super nasal voice, said. “Are you having vivid dreams about worlds you know nothing about? You could be experiencing Sudden Super Strength Syndrome.”

“Teenage girls everywhere are coming down with this new syndrome,” the other actor, a red-haired girl, said. “Call the number on the screen to find out more.”

Sloane leaned in, trying to read the number. She dialed what she thought it was and pressed call, holding her cell phone to her ear. It rang for a moment, and then a girl’s voice said, “You have reached the support line. Please hold.” 

While she waited, Sloane forwarded the commercial to Nora’s school email, cleared her history, logged off of the computer, and walked outside, where she wouldn’t be overheard. She wandered around campus listening to the hold music, her mind racing. What would she find on the other end of the phone line?

What she found was a chipper voice.

“Hello! You’ve reached the Slayer support line. This is Dawn!” 

“Hi,” Sloane said, crushing a stick in her left hand. “Um, Slayer?”

“Vampire Slayer,” Dawn said. “It’s a whole thing. Basically, there’s some ancient magic that chooses one girl in all the world to face the forces of darkness.”

“But there are others,” Sloane said, confused.

“Well,” Dawn said, “there’s some slightly newer magic that means that lots of girls have the power. But that’s where it comes from. So basically, you were chosen to save the world from vampires and demons and stuff, but there’s a lot of Slayers, so you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“If I did?” Sloane asked, cautious.

“You’d come to England and train with us, and then you’d be stationed in a place somewhere in the world.”

“I can’t go to England,” Sloane said. “I’m in college.”

“You could come over the summer,” Dawn said. “We’ll send you resources in the meantime. And if your college has enough Slayers, we could even send someone out to you.”

“It’s very small,” Sloane said.

“Maybe not, then,” Dawn said. “What’s your name?”

“Sloane Goldberg,” Sloane said. “From Michigan, if that’s relevant.”

“It’s not really, but thanks,” Dawn said. “Can you give me your mailing address?”

“Sure,” Sloane said. There was an awkward pause while she realized that Dawn was expecting it  _ right now _ . She recited her college address, hesitating at the zip code.

“Thanks,” Dawn said. “I’m going to mail you some stuff on vampires and demons. There’s a handbook and a few other resources. Some true stories from the field, a stake, a cross-- it’s all part of the welcome packet.”

“Sounds good,” Sloane said. “And I’m going to tell my friend Nora to call.”

“Thanks,” Dawn said. “Doing my job for me.”

Sloane laughed and said goodbye. She had a lot to think about. 

After all that, she still hadn’t seen a vampire. She didn’t have long to wait, though. Luckily, it happened when she was with Nora, wandering through town just a little after dark; one moment, they were talking about the books they had gotten earlier, and the next, those same books were on the ground, knocked out of their hands as a vampire attacked from behind. 

It was like with the car crash. Instinct completely took over. Sloane and Nora were completely in tune with each other and with the vampire, kicking and punching in synch. Another vampire popped up, and Nora split off, leaving Sloane alone with hers, and Sloane was a little less prepared for that, but she had her stake in her bag, so it was just a matter of dodging and ducking until she managed to get down to her bag and grab the stake out of it, and then she plunged it into the vampire. 

Nothing happened.

She took it out and stabbed the vampire again, this time slightly to the left. 

Its body dissolved into dust, sending the stake clattering to the ground. Sloane bent down to pick it up, marveling at what had just happened.

She was a vampire Slayer.


End file.
